Underworld

“And you know why, Joe?”

  “He’s doing something he shouldn’t be doing.”

  “He’s got that pussy smile when he walks by. Which could only mean one thing. The kid is eating box lunch at the Y.”

  “Sboccato,” the butcher said happily, berating Antone, rasping the word from deep in his throat. Foulmouth.

  Nick went to the door and opened it and waited for a woman to walk past and then flicked his cigarette toward the curbstone.

  “Who’s better than him?” Antone said.

  “You going to school, Nicky?”

  “He goes when he goes. Hey. Who’s better than him?” Antone said. “I would give my right arm.”

  Antone took the bag out of the case. It held chops, chicken breasts and fresh bacon. He passed it over the top to Nick.

  “Who’s better than you?” he said.

  “Be good,” Cousin Joe said.

  “My right arm I would give. Look at this kid.”

  A taste of blood and sawdust hung in the air.

  “Regards to your mother, okay?”

  “Be good, okay?”

  “Be good,” the butcher said.

  Bronzini lay beaming in the massive bath, a cast-iron relic raised on ball-and-claw feet, only his head unsubmerged.

  Salt crystals fizzed all around him.

  His wife leaning against the door frame, Klara, with their two-year-old affixed to her leg, the child repeating words that daddy issued from the deeps.

  “Tangerine,” Albert said.

  This was happiness as it was meant to evolve when first conceived in caves, in mud huts on the grassy plain. Mamelah and our beautiful bambina. And his own mother, ghastly ill but here at last, murmurous, a strong and mortal presence in the house. And Albert himself in the hot bath, back from the hunt, returned to the fundamental cluster.

  He summarized the meeting with Father Paulus. A slouching Klara seemed about to speak several times, the way her body begins to drag along a surface, going restless and skeptical.

  “An impressive man. I want you to come along next time. Or I’ll invite him here.”

  “He doesn’t want to come here.”

  “Doctorate in philosophy at Yale. Graduated magna cum laude in sacred theology from some Jesuit center in Europe. Louvain, I believe,” and he formed the word as a privileged utterance. “Holds a chair in the humanities at Fordham.”

  “But he’s not inclined to help you with the boy.”

  “He’ll help. He’ll come to a match. Tangerine,” he said to the child and raised his arms out of the water.

  Klara lifted the girl up over the roll-rim of the tub and Albert sat up and took her under the arms, holding her upright, feet in white socks barely touching the water so she could step along the surface, laughing, making little kick-waves. And he felt like a mother seal, yes, a mother, not some raucous coughing bull or whatever the male is called—he would have to look it up.

  “Do you know the old painting,” he said, “that shows dozens of children playing games in some town square?”

  “Hundreds actually. Two hundred anyway. Bruegel. I find it unwholesome. Why?”

  “It came up in conversation.”

  “I don’t know what art history says about this painting. But I say it’s not that different from the other famous Bruegel, armies of death marching across the landscape. The children are fat, backward, a little sinister to me. It’s some kind of menace, some folly. Kinderspielen. They look like dwarves doing something awful.”

  He held the girl kicking, raising her just above the surface, then dropping her a notch so she could splash lightly, laughing when the spray hit him in the face.

  “Fat and backward. Did you hear that, little girl? As a matter of fact she’s getting pretty heavy, isn’t she? Whoa. Aren’t you, sweetheart?”

  Sooner or later the daily litany of delicate questions and curt replies.

  “And my mother?”

  “Resting.”

  “And the doctor came?”

  “No.”

  “The doctor did not come?”

  “No.”

  “When is he coming?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow. And Mrs. Ketchel looked in?”

  “Looked in, exactly.”

  The child stepped along the surface and he lifted her high so Klara could take her. She swung her past the end of the tub and managed to have her wet socks off about a second after she touched down. One of those thousand-a-day death struggles of mother and child. Wails and bent limbs and a certain physical insistence on the woman’s part. All done in a compact blur that dazzled Albert and made him lean over the edge to espy the two dinky socks lying soggy on the tile, as confirmation.

  His mother suffered from a neuromuscular condition, myasthenia gravis, and she lay helpless much of the time, eyelids sagged, arms too weak to move except in ever slower syllables of gesture, reduced to units now, and her vision evidently doubled.

  He recited the word for the child one last time as she was hustled out.

  He’d brought his mother here, prevailing over her own fatalism and his wife’s practical misgivings. You are the son, you take care of the parents. And the illness, the drama of a failing body, the way impending death made her seem saintly, with an icon’s fixedness, a stern and staring and enameled beauty. Albert, who shunned any form of organized worship and thought God was a mass delusion, sat and watched her for hours, combed her hair, soaked up her diarrhea with bunched Kleenex, talked to her in his boyhood Italian, and he felt that the house, the flat, was suffused with a reverence, old, sad, heavy and impressive—an otherworldliness, now that she was here.

  The salts had stopped fizzing and he lay in silence a while. He felt the contentment begin to slip away. There was something about evening perhaps that caused a transient sadness. He heard Klara in the kitchen preparing the meal. Things there he must keep at a distance. Her moods, her doubts. He thought about his own situation. Things he must confront. His complacency, his distractedness, his position at school, his sneaky-pete drinking.

  It came to him suddenly when it finally came. Tangerine. How he’d stood in the market this afternoon peeling the loose-skinned fruit and eating the sweet sections, slightly stinging as the juice washed through his mouth, and how the scent seemed to breathe some essence, but why, of Morocco. And now he knew, incontrovertibly. Tangerine, Tanger, Tangier. The port from which the fruit was first shipped to Europe.

  He felt better now, thank you.

  How language is webbed in the senses. Out of sand-blaze brilliance into quirky minds such as his, into touch, taste and fragrance. He thought he’d linger just a bit longer, let the bath take total hold, ease and alleviate, before he put on clothes and entered the complex boxes where people do their living.

  Nothing fits the body so well as water.

  2

  * * *

  Later they would go get the car but first they hung around a while, letting the night close in, sitting on the stoop in front of 611.

  JuJu did not sit down until he spread his hanky on the steps. He was talking about the new model cars, just out, this one’s got the horsepower, that one’s got the handling, and he was earnest and fervent.

  “You talk like you’re ready to whip out your wallet,” Nick said. “When you know and I know.”

  Scarfo stood on the corner about ten yards away eating a jelly apple, a grown man, holding it away from his body and leaning in to bite.

  “There’s nothing in there but a rubber.”

  They watched people come home from work. Nick sat haunched on the iron rail just above JuJu. It was cold and they came plugging home, clerks, bus drivers, garment workers, elevator operators.

  Nick watched them and smoked.

  “That’s you,” he said.

  “What are you talking?”

  “Two years tops. That’s you,” he said. “Could happen sooner.”

  “It’s a job. They have jobs. What do you want them to do?”

/>   “I’ll tell you what I think.”

  “Save me a drag on that cigarette.”

  They watched Scarfo talking to the shoemaker, holding the jelly apple at arm’s length now.

  “Anything’s better than what they’re doing. That’s what I think.”

  “They’re working. Let them work.”

  Nick watched and smoked, secretaries, maintenance men, bank tellers, messengers, typists in the typing pool, stenographers in the steno pool.

  “It’s not the work. It’s the regular hours,” Nick said. “Going in the same time every day. Clocking in, taking the train. It’s the train. Going in together. Coming home together.”

  “You’re better than that.”

  “I’m better, I’m worse, what’s the difference.”

  When Nick took the last drag on the cigarette he held the butt with his thumb and middle finger, the middle finger poised to flick so that he took the drag and flicked in one prolonged motion, sending the butt toward the curbstone.

  “Thanks,” JuJu said.

  “For what?”

  “You rather collect twenty weeks a year than have a steady job that pays decent?”

  “I tell you what I rather do. I rather get my dick sucked by the one in the green coat.”

  “Where?”

  “The one in the green coat.”

  “Where?”

  “Across the street,” Nick said.

  “You like that?”

  “Hey. I didn’t say I want to marry her.”

  “You couldn’t save me a drag?”

  “What? Did you ask?”

  “She’s awful short,” JuJu said.

  “Good. She can blow me standing up.”

  “Save wear and tear on her knees.”

  “God makes short people for a reason.”

  Scarfo wore neat creased pants and good shoes and he ate with his body contorted to keep the jelly from dripping on his clothes. He was talking to the shoemaker about something and the shoemaker stood there squat-bodied and blank.

  “You got gas money?” JuJu said.

  “We don’t need gas. For where we’re going?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the poolroom,” Nick said.

  They watched the shoemaker think. Like watching a bulldog take a crap.

  The people came home from work, thinning out over time, the merest scatter now. It was the night before Thanksgiving and there was a thing you were supposed to feel about a holiday and a day off and getting ready for the big feast with the relatives coming over but Nicky’s days off had started a couple of weeks earlier when he stopped going to school and there weren’t any relatives nearby, which was something, in fact, to be thankful for.

  He tapped JuJu on the shoulder. They walked over to Quarry Road, a stretch of weedy landscape traveled mainly by dog walkers. This was where the ’46 Chevy waited at the base of the high stone wall that surrounded the hospital for the incurable.

  They were too young to have drivers’ licenses but it didn’t matter because the car was stolen anyway.

  They’d seen it parked near the zoo about three weeks ago, key in the ignition, near nightfall, and Nick had gotten in, an impulse, a thing you don’t even have time to dare yourself to do, and he started up the engine. JuJu watched for a second and got in. Vito was with them, Bats, and he got in. They drove around for much of the night and it was still a joke, an escapade, and they chipped in for gas and drove around some more and then left the car parked next to an empty lot, with Nick taking the keys, and it was still there the next day. They got a set of plates from Vito’s uncle’s car that was in traction, more or less, for the winter, and they exchanged these for the original plates and drove mainly at night because the brashness had given way to a responsible sense of ownership and they went only limited distances because it seemed safer and they didn’t have money to spend on gas and there was nowhere to go anyway.

  JuJu started the car up and they sat there listening to it throb.

  “You see what you’re doing to this mat,” Nick said. “Only three weeks it’s been. You’re wearing it out. You’re wearing down the ridges with your feet. You and her. Use the backseat, animal.”

  “The backseat’s cramped.”

  “Animale. “

  “It’s roomier up here.”

  JuJu and his girlfriend shared the front seat for hours at a time, Gloria, french-kissing into the night, the young man’s hands exploratory, but it was the action of their feet that caused the trouble, it was the grinding of their feet in unavailing passion that was destroying the traction on the mat.

  “Explain to her that if she puts out, Gloria, in a polite way, tell her, the damage to the car will be reduced in the long run. You won’t have all this frustration that the both of you take out on the furniture.”

  “The furniture.”

  “Put out or stay out. Tell her nice-nice. Because we can’t afford this girl destroying our property.”

  JuJu put the car in gear and drove the two blocks to the poolroom, parking away from the streetlight. They got out, examined the car and then crossed the street and went up the long flight of steel-tipped stairs and through the tall metal door into the sparse smoke of the big room, where a single dim figure was hunched over a table, cue ball spinning in the gloom.

  A woman rapped a penny on the window and Klara looked up. The woman waved, missus somebody, and Klara smiled and hurried on. She had company coming and she was late.

  She stopped for some things at the grocer’s and then went up the front steps and there was Albert’s mother in the window, cranked-up, wearing a white hospital gown and facing straight out, with a religious medal dangling, and she looked a little like a vision or someone waiting for a vision.

  Klara did not want to give this striking scene a title out of some Renaissance gallery because that would be unkind. But the fact, after all, was that the woman was on display.

  Mrs. Ketchel sat with Albert’s mother this afternoon. The child was being minded by a girl in the building who was capable and trustworthy.

  Klara tidied the place a little, not much, and then stood in the spare room looking at the sketch on the easel, a study of the room itself. She’d been sketching the room for some time now. She did studies of the door frame, the molding on the walls, she did the luggage stacked in a corner.

  When Rochelle rang the bell she was standing in the kitchen smoking.

  “So, Klara. Here you are.”

  “Don’t look too closely. I didn’t clean.”

  “You don’t clean for old friends.”

  They sat in the living room with coffee and snacks.

  “So here you are.”

  “Exactly, what, six blocks from where we grew up?”

  “It feels strange coming back. Everybody’s so ugly. I swear I never noticed.”

  The real Rochelle. This is what Klara wanted but wasn’t sure she’d get.

  “You have a new place,” she said.

  “Riverside Drive. How did I get so lucky I don’t know.”

  “You’re looking very Parisian or something. The hair, maybe, or the clothes. What is it?”

  “Once you start, you can’t stop. It’s like a disease,” Rochelle said. “You still have your willowy look, which is the envy of my life.”

  Rochelle’s husband was a developer. She called him Harry the Land Man. They went to Florida and Bermuda and shopped for lingerie together on Fifth Avenue.

  “So you’re here, Klara. Teaching art.”

  “There’s a community center. The children come to me, some of them kicking, some of them screaming. Others are very willing, they love to draw.”

  “So it’s satisfying.”

  “At times, yes, I enjoy it.”

  “So you enjoy it. So it’s good. And Albert. He’s a teacher too. Everybody’s a teacher. Half the world is teaching the other half.”

  “Albert’s a real teacher. A professional.”

  “That’s his mother
in there?”

  “A forceful woman actually, even in this condition. I admire her in a number of ways. Takes no crap from anybody.”

  “She’s dying in there?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll let her die in the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were always open-minded that way. You have a lover, Klara?”

  “Ten minutes you’re in my house. The answer is no.”

  “You want to ask me if I fool around?”

  “I know what I’m supposed to say. You’d be crazy to fool around. Risk all that? Harry, the apartment, the underwear? But in fact.”

  “Once or twice only. I need something in the afternoon or I feel useless.”

  Rochelle wanted to see her work. There were several small canvases stacked against the wall in the spare room and they stood there a while, looking. The pressure Rochelle felt to say the right thing mashed her head into her torso.

  “Harry wants to buy art.”

  “Tell him to get an advisor.”

  “I’ll quote you that you said that.”

  Klara showed some pastels.

  “So Albert’s a dear sweet man, right? He likes it that you paint?”

  “He thinks it relaxes me.”

  “So you enjoy it. You come in here and paint. I can picture you, Klara. Standing here thinking, measuring with the brush. You’re trying this, you’re trying that. Once I let an elevator man rub against my thigh, in Florida.”

  They had another cup of coffee and then went upstairs to see Klara’s child. She was on the floor playing with jigsaw pieces and they stayed half an hour talking to the baby-sitter and watching the child make a world independent of the puzzle.

  “Klara, say it. I should have a baby.”

  “You’re the last person I would say it to.”

  “Thank you. We’re friends to the end. Give me a hug, I’ll go home happy.”

  They went down and stood on the stoop talking. Three men were pushing a car to get it started. A light snow was falling.

  “So she takes no crap, Albert’s mother. Take me to her deathbed before it’s too late. Maybe she can tell me something I should know.”

  When she was gone Klara went into the spare room and restacked all the canvases and stood looking at the sketches she’d done. The door, the doorknob, the walls, the window frame.